Robert Greene’s new documentary, Bisbee ’17, has arrived just in time.

It’s a film occasioned by the centennial of a grave moment in American labor history: a mining strike that resulted in a massive miscarriage of justice. On July 12, 1917, about 1,300 striking miners and their supporters—local citizens and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) activist union—were rounded up by a gang of some 2,000 deputized citizens (calling themselves “armed loyalists”) and deported en masse from the copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, to Tres Hermanas, New Mexico, on charges that they posed a threat to the American way of life.

This was a loaded charge. World War I was raging overseas, and resistance to laboring in the war’s favor was itself seen as an anti-nationalist threat. The added dimension of a strike stoked the local community’s fears of Communism and socialism—thanks in large part to misleading local propaganda. The men were striking the mining company Phelps Dodge, in the name of better working conditions, just treatment for their labor organizations, and—perhaps above all—better treatment of the miners themselves, most of them Mexican and Eastern European. The Bisbee of 1917 was home to people of over 30 nationalities, according to the movie; a contemporary Bisbee resident likened the act of evacuating over 1,000 of its ethnic and political “others” to an ethnic cleansing.

The loyalists went house by house, and rounded everyone up by gunpoint. The deportation itself was a 16-hour train ride, with no food or water, to Tres Hermanas, New Mexico—the middle of nowhere. Miners were threatened with death if they ever returned.

These miners were peoples’ brothers, fathers, sons; it takes a powerful social force to render a community’s loved ones into the enemy. But that’s power. The mining company owned the press, the library, the local hotel, and the hospital. “In a company town,” a current resident of Bisbee tells us in the film, “the company makes the rules.”

As Greene films it, Bisbee is a small town seemingly arisen out of those beauteous copper pits, with their shades of red and gold and utter desolation. The last mines in Bisbee shut down in 1975; over time, a current resident tells us, Bisbee went from being one of the richest towns in Arizona to becoming one of the very poorest. The mine is intractably woven into the social fabric of the community—and of this event, which is where Bisbee ’17 comes in.

Bisbee has never, as a community, dealt with what happened—until now. The documentary depicts present-day Bisbee and its town-wide effort to finally reckon with this past by re-enacting it. You read that correctly: in front of Greene’s cameras, contemporary Bisbee, donning old-timey costumes and imbued with a grave sense of responsibility to the past, re-stages the strike, the roundup, the shuffling onto trains, forcing Greene’s film to become a chronicle of what art can do to enliven the ghosts of buried history.

Inescapably, given the subject, this is a story of how power—particularly power exercised in the name of nationalism—has often been wielded against the vulnerable, be they immigrants, the poor, laborers, or, in this case, all of the above. But the movie also smartly chronicles present-day Bisbee and the people therein, many of whom descend from both sides of this tragedy, and many, too, who’d never even heard of it. The movie amply depicts the unyielding ties between family and community, and the stories we pass down, loaded—again, inevitably—with ideas about who was in the right.

Here’s a phrase you hear more than once: “I was born and raised in Bisbee.” And yet these people also frequently tell us that they’d never even heard about the strike and deportation. The ones who had, had heard it passed down from relatives who were there, including one clan—the Ray family—whose great-grandfather was responsible for rounding up his own brother, one of the striking miners. The family’s sons perform that split in the recreation, playing the great-grandfather and great-great uncle, respectively. They perform the brothers’ last encounter—a roundup at gunpoint—in the home of their mother, who’s brought to tears.

These ideas about what happened in 1917 inflect how the performers conceive of their “roles”—which is what separates their approach to this history from any old re-enactment. The town’s residents each tell us who they are, how long they’ve lived in Bisbee, who they’re going to play in the re-enactment, and what they know of the event itself. And they tell us how they feel. Some of them posit that the event was unforgivable. Others—including the man who plays Walter S. Douglas, president of the mining company—would do it again. The daughter of a company man tells us she was raised to believe that what Phelps Dodge did was right. Then she hedges. “I have to remember those people telling the stories are in Bisbee,” she says. “In other words, they weren’t deported.”

It all gives the film the strange tingle of discomfiting urgency. These words—deportation, socialist—and arguments (“I see both sides”) are, in an obvious sense, immediately relevant to our own fraught political moment. It’s funny how these conflicts and their language have traveled across time. Are we really still here, stuck in this same mess?

Greene’s film moves in a forward, circular motion, through swift, precise interviews and extraordinarily evocative images of the mines that continue to remind us where we are. We meet more and more of “the cast”—get more angles on this history, and a richer sense of current town sentiment about it—as people gradually move further into their characters. Some of their views are disconcerting, but the film doesn’t criticize. It’s interested in the continuum between then and now—and in the ways our own knowledge of community, and of ourselves in the world, can determine how we embody the lives of others. It’s the consummate act of empathy: restoring the past by bringing it to bear, in a real way, on our own lives.

The climax, of course, is the re-enactment itself. People really get into it! Which is chilling, in some ways; one young Latino man, a semi-focus of the film, stands out for the brewing, real-life sense of political rage this journey seems to have stirred in him—which is, one senses, the point. At the end of it all, one of the actors says it plainly: “This was like the largest group-therapy session.”